planpdx.org: Interview with Don Clark

Date of Interview: February 2000 Interview By: Ernie Bonner Location: Don Clark's home on the Willamette River

DC = Don Clark EB = Ernie Bonner

EB: This is March 8th, 2002, and this is an interview with Don Clark at his home in Southwest Portland on the river. Wonderful view. So first thing, why don't you take off, Don, and just give us a little summary of how you got to Portland?

DC: Well, I'm a native born Oregonian. I was born in Silverton, Oregon in 1933, and my folks had gone back there because of the Depression and they lived on my grandfather's farm in a converted garage. I was born in a doctor's home in Silverton, in the upstairs of the doctor's home, because they didn't have a hospital. My folks moved back to Portland I suppose within a year or so after my birth, so I grew up in Portland. I grew up in Southeast Portland; I grew up most of the time in Southeast Portland living on land that my great-great grandfather had as a donation land claim, which was Clinton-Kelly. I went to Wood-stock Elementary School, except for during World War II I went to California where my dad was stationed, and then back to Portland and graduated from Woodstock Elementary School and then went to Franklin High School. When I was in grade school I suppose I first began feeling strong feelings about conservation and things like that, and that was probably for several reasons. One of them, I was a fiercely proud Oregonian. I really liked Oregon, and I thought Oregon was the premier place in the world, and I kind of wanted to keep it that way. My father at that time worked for the Department of Agriculture, and he'd bring home, among other things, books on soil erosion and things, so I'd look at those and I'd be very upset about the fact that the soil was eroding and whatever else.

EB: There goes Oregon!

DC: Yeah, there goes the whole thing down the river. Then my mother was a very romantic kind of person, and she would see a forest and just rave about how gorgeous it was and how wonderful it was and how close to God it made you feel, and all these kind of things. So there was that, and I remember joining the Oregon Green Guard, which was a state Department of Forestry organization for little kids, to teach them not to build fires in the woods and stuff like that, is what it really was, and I had a little card that I carried around from about the third grade on that said I was a member of the Oregon Green Guard and a protector of Oregon's greenness. Then after I went to Franklin High School, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do and ended up going to Vanport College, which is the forerunner of Portland State. At that time it was kind of a veterans' college, and all the people who didn't quite know what they wanted to do or where they were going to go or didn't have any money ended up there, and it was kind of the working person's school. Before very long I had a wife and children; very, very quickly. I think I was nineteen and my first wife was eighteen when we were married, and we had my son very soon thereafter, and I was supporting pretty soon two children and my wife and I, so I had to work many hours. I remember at one time during my sopho-more year I had three different jobs I was working at the same time, with a total of 56 hours a week, and I was also carrying a full load at Portland State. Then I went down to San Francisco State...

EB: That was in the '50s?

DC: Yeah, it was in the '50s, the early '50s. Then I went down to San Francisco State because I got a job at San Quentin prison. I took a civil service exam when I was down visiting my folks, who were by that time living in San Francisco, and for whatever reason I passed very high on the list and was offered a job as a corrections officer, at age 21; in fact, I had to become 21, I think, before I could accept the job. It did a number of things for me. It allowed me to have free tuition at San Francisco State, or almost free tuition. At that time California had a policy that everybody who wanted to go to college could go to college. They don't have that anymore, but at that time they did have that, and so the tuition was almost nothing. It could have been, you know, like a filing fee or something, like $12 or something, but it wasn't tuition. And I could work nights at San Quentin prison, and I did that through my baccalaureate, and in fact I took a leave my final quarter because I had 19 hours and I didn't want to try to take that and work full-time. Afterwards I worked at some of the honor camps, which were either in the redwoods in California or up on the Klamath River in Siskiyou County, California, Northern California, way out in the middle of nowhere. One of them was a fire camp, and I was on some of the big fires in the redwoods with groups of inmates both from San Quentin and from Folsum prison, and redwoods, of course if you are not a lover of nature before you visit the redwoods, you'll be a lover of nature afterwards. Then I was on the Klamath River at a road camp where the inmates were building a road, the Klamath River Road, which is, I don't know, California number whatever it is now. Then I came up here and became a deputy sheriff for Multnomah County. I wanted to get back to Portland. All the time I was in California I was trying to figure out how to get back to Oregon. So I became a deputy sheriff for Multnomah County, and then I decided I wasn't doing enough, so I took a job as a United States civil service investigator and bounced around the country for a short period of time. Ended up back in San Francisco and didn't like that at all and quit, and came back and was a sheriff's deputy again. I still didn't think I was doing what I should be doing, although I liked being a sheriff's deputy a lot; that's fun, and it did a lot of things I wanted to do, but at the same time I didn't feel like I was doing enough. So then I went back to school and got a fifth year at Portland State and got a teaching credential and taught first at Columbia Elementary School out by the Columbia River, which was outside the School District No. 1 at that time, and then at Dunaway in Eastmoreland I taught for several years, taught the homeroom seventh grade and I taught girls' P.E. for eighth, seventh, and sixth grades, and I taught clear down to fourth grade science, even. I could always read enough to keep ahead of the fourth graders. Then I don't know why, but I missed being a sheriff's deputy, so I started being a sheriff's deputy and a schoolteacher at the same time, and so I was working two full-time jobs, and I did that for a while and then decided I wasn't doing justice to either one of them and I had to choose, so I quit teaching and went back as a full-time deputy sheriff. Then in 1962, Francis Lambert, who was the Sheriff, decided he wasn't going to run, and I had done a bunch of research on administrative matters and training and professional standards and other things for the Sheriff's Office and had got the idea that a lot could be made of that institution if the right things happened. At that time you had to resign if you were going to run for public office, and so I went down on the final day to file for that office, and it was like 4:00 in the afternoon and I had until 5:00 to file, and I told Sheriff Lambert that I wanted to resign to run for Sheriff, and he thought that was a great idea and he thought that I would make a fine Sheriff, and he even thought that I could win, which amazed me because I didn't have much in the way of political experience, and there were 28 other people going to run for that office, and a number of them were well-known, and some of them had had name familiarity because they were auto dealers and realtors and athletes and all kinds of things that gave them a leg up in name familiarity. But for whatever reason, and mostly I suppose because in the primary I got both newspapers' endorsements - I got the Journal endorsement, which I really attribute my success to the Oregon Journal and their first endorsement because it singled me out and said, "Here's the guy you ought to look at." Then later on I got the Oregonian endorsement in the primary, too, so I had both endorsements in the primary. The Oregonian left me in the general, but the Journal stuck with me. In fact, I think the Journal stuck with me. In fact, I think the Journal stuck with me until they finally got me clear retired and out of town. When I was Sheriff, I took all the instincts and the concerns and everything else in there with me, and one of the things that had really irritated me as a deputy was going around and seeing the old junked car lots. In fact, all over the country I hated that, and I'd see that and I'd think that somebody was despoiling America, you know. So one of the first things I did was to give orders that we were to strictly enforce the law as it related to wrecking yards, and immediately the Multnomah County Planning Commission thought that was a swell idea, and they in fact passed some resolution or something that the Sheriff was doing a good job because he was out there trying to enforce the Oregon state law regarding wrecking yards: they had to have fences around them, site-obscuring fences, and they couldn't pollute things, and a whole bunch of other stuff. I had deputies out there tromping through those places writing citations right and left, and people were going to jail. I got involved with a number of other planning issues. I remember the Oregon State Highway Commission was tearing down some of the old guard rails up the Columbia River Gorge, the stoneworks...

EB: On that historic highway.

DC: Yeah. And they were replacing it with metal guard rail because it was more efficient, it was safer, and all these good reasons and everything. So I wrote to then-Governor Hatfield and said that I was highly concerned about that, that I was an Oregonian, that my grandfather had worked on that highway and that I was very proud of that highway and it was an important part of Multnomah County and that we ought to do everything we could to preserve it in good order and all this kind of business. And lo and behold, Hatfield agreed with me. So he wrote a letter to the State Highway Commission saying, "I think the Sheriff's right, and I think we ought to stop doing that and we ought to rehabilitate those stone works and not tear them down." So I've always had a kind of a fond place in my heart for Hatfield because of that, and he and I have collaborated on other things, including the Columbia River Gorge, later on in a big way. I remember I gave speeches when I was Sheriff on preserving Oregon and taking care of Oregon, and cleaning things up, and tidying the countryside and all that kind of stuff that I be-lieved in but didn't really have a whole lot to do with being Sheriff. When I was running for Sheriff, a woman listening to one of my speeches told my uncle, "I'm not going to vote for that man, I think he's a communist." My uncle said, "Well, why do you think he's a communist?" The lady said, "Because he said that there are many places in Portland where we should tear down the buildings and plant trees." I was nosing around those kind of issues, even though most people would have been happier if the sheriff had just been acting like a sheriff. In the Spring of 1966, Multnomah County adopted a home rule charter. The home rule charter abolished the elected office of Sheriff. In the Fall election there was a repealer on the ballot for the home rule charter, which meant no one knew if the home rule charter was going to be or wasn't going to be. Thus in the g election of 1966 I was on the ballot for re-election as Sheriff of Multnomah County, and as Chairman of the Board of County Commissioners under the new charter. My opponent for Chairman was Mike Gleason, a long-time County Commissioner and a well-known name. A lot of people couldn't understand why on earth I was on the ballot twice. There were a lot of things wrong with that election, and I probably should never have allowed myself to do that, but anyway, it was something I did. I ran for both things, and I won overwhelmingly for Sheriff, I got more votes for Sheriff than anybody else on the ballot for anything, but I lost for Chairman of the Board of County Commissioners. So in January 1967 I went to Portland State as an assistant professor of criminal justice in the Urban Studies Center. I was really interested in the Urban Studies Center. The old Metropolitan Study Commission offices were co-located in our building. Kay Rich and Don Carlson were officed there, and it was in many ways the hub of progressive governmental and planning reform. Lynn Musolf was the head of the Urban Studies Center, but these guys, Kay Rich and Don Carlson, were a part of that Metropolitan Study Commission that was attached to the Urban Studies Center, but independent. Also, there was a lot of interesting literature on land use, and I remember a publication that I think the Metropolitan Study Commission published on "Which way do you want your community to grow?" It showed the various land forms and the transportation systems that fed those land use decisions. I remember one was sprawl city, and it just kind of went every which way, and another was corridors, and it followed the freeways out in all these directions. That was the first time I really became aware of the Portland-Vancouver Metropolitan Transportation Study that had all these freeways going every which way. The interesting thing is some of it goes back to the Moses plan, where Moses came to town and had some vision of all these freeways. So I became alarmed. I saw that no public body had said that we needed a kind of land use and this a of urban form, and therefore we ought to develop a supporting kind of transportation system. It was just exactly the opposite. It was we're going to build this transportation system, and it's going to dictate what happens in land use. So I flopped around about that and talked to everyone I could and was told "that's the way things seem to be going." I kept wondering why somebody didn't do something about that. Why didn't CRAG do something about it, or somebody do something about it, you know; why didn't the County, the City, the State change all this? I also spent quite a bit of time thinking about crime and urban. I remember I had Portland State get a big bus, and I conducted an urban crime tour of the city. We talked about building for defensible space and saw where the poor people lived, I was interested in socio-mapping at that time; overlays showing where all the problems were in the community, you know, the TB cases and the lack of plumbing and the narcotics addictions and the arrest records and all of that. The overlays just keep heaping those things up, and they all just color in certain parts of the map. So I was really interested in the urban dynamic and was reaching out beyond criminal justice. I think one of the reasons Portland State hired me was that I had changed the standard for sheriff's deputies to require a college degree for any entering deputy. I also had been an advisor to two task forces of the President's Crime Commission, one in corrections, and the other in law enforcement. I was on several study groups on the Law Enforcement Task Force, one on the organization and management of law enforcement agencies chaired by O.W. Wilson, the Superintendent of Police in Chicago. It certainly wasn't my academic achievements that convinced Portland State to hire me, but they saw that we had done some things at the County and the Sheriff's Office and felt that I might add something to Portland State. It was the day of LEAA, and it was, in fact, an LEAA grant that allowed the BA Program to get started. The idea of starting criminal justice programs at additional colleges and universities came out of the President's Crime Commission. The President's Crime Commission cited Multnomah County and said that every police agency in the United States should adopt this as the standard of educational background for new recruits.

EB: What's the timing on this? You're teaching at Portland State?

DC: I'm teaching.

EB: You're not the Sheriff anymore.

DC: I'm not the Sheriff anymore. I stopped being Sheriff in January of 1967. I was re-elected Sheriff, but an elected Sheriff didn't exist anymore. I wasn't elected Chairman of the Board of Commissioners, and it did exist, and Mike Gleason, of course, wanted me out of there. He had the appointing power to appoint the Sheriff under the new Home Rule charter, and he had initially appointed an interim guy, and then later on the interim guy left and he appointed another from Chicago. But I was by that time up at Portland State. I was teaching. The interesting thing is, almost every job I've ever had, I have done the same things. I was kind of doing the same things publicly at Portland State that I was doing when I was Sheriff or when I was, you know, teaching, or whatever I was doing. I was interested in the same things, and I was advocating to the public. I was sticking my nose in issues, and I was writing letters to the editor in defense of public housing and other worthy causes. Portland State was very tolerant of having me thrash around the community doing all kinds of things, including making controversial statements; so it all was kind of a nice fit for two years. I also recruited Lee Brown to be my boss at Portland State. One of the jobs that I was given when hired was to find the Director. I was the Associate Director, and I could never be more than Associate Director, nor more than an assistant professor because I didn't have the necessary degrees. Lee Brown had a Ph.D., a shiny brand new one out of University of California, and he was just great. He had the right set of values and experiences, so I went after him and got Portland State to offer what he needed to come. So he became a member of that team. Later on that all becomes important to me when I put my administration together at the County. I dipped back into the Urban Studies Center and grabbed off a whole bunch of people, including Ken Gervais, Denny West, Rena Cusma and Lee Brown. I even had the County contract with the Housing Authority of Portland, which by that time Lynn Musolf was running. Thus, HAP was the County's housing authority, as well as the City's housing authority. So the Urban Studies Center and Portland State as an institution were very, very important to Multnomah County and to my administration. While I was at Portland State one of the interesting things that happened was a lunch Lynn Musolf and I had with someone from the establishment. This person wanted to know if I was interested in running for Mayor against Terry Shrunk, because Terry by that time was not very well, and he was getting along in years, and if he was going to do some things, they were done, and he wasn't going to do much more, and there was kind of a sense in the City that new things had to happen, and Terry wasn't able to provide that kind of leadership anymore. It was a general sense I think that that was probably so. I said, well, first I wasn't inclined to do that because for one thing Terry Shrunk had hired me as a deputy sheriff when he was the Sheriff. I had been a deputy when he went through all the turmoil about whether he was a crook or not, you know, and all the hearings and everything else, and I knew, and the sheriff's deputies, even the ones who hated him, knew that that wasn't true and he wasn't a corrupt. And he certainly never picked up any money from crooks in North Portland or did anything like that. I felt a sense of loyalty to him. I also said, "But if I ever did do it, I'd have to have $100,000 in the bank," and at that time that sounded like an astronomical amount of money, "and I'd have to have Travis Cross as a campaign manager." Travis Cross had been Hatfield's political guy, and then had run the political arm at St. Vincent Hospital and put together the money for building the new St. Vincent Hospital. So that was how extravagant I was being about what it would take to knock Terry Shrunk out as in many, many ways Terry Shrunk was very loved by the people by that time. He was an institution himself, even though he had slowed and wasn't very progressive anymore. He had a terrible time making decisions, Terry did. He would just drive people nuts by taking things under advisement, which meant they disappeared and you never knew what happened to them again. I did decide I was going to run for the Board of County Commissioners. I liked Multnomah County, and I wanted to be a part of Multnomah County. I really wanted to run Multnomah County, but that wasn't open, so I ran against Dan Mosee, who was a kind of a crackpot who lived out in Southeast Portland. He was a popular crackpot and he'd been running for office forever, and he had signs up; in fact, there was an article in I think Doug Baker's column once about him having signs in North Dakota. They were orange and black, and they were everywhere. I knew one of the deputies had said he'd paneled the whole basement of his house with old Dan Mosee signs - and painted over them, of course.

EB: And they were the same ones he had had since he started running.

DC: Oh, yeah. Over and over and over again. But anyway, he was just a kind of a ding-dong, but he had a popular appeal to him because he was of an ethnic minority - let's see, I don't remember whether he was Lebanese or Syrian, I can't remember which, but he would tell about how great it was to come to America and be the son of somebody who came here - it's the American story, you know, and how can you be against that? He was, in his own way, quite an orator, and he'd kind of pump people up. So he had quite a following. Anyway, I ran against Dan Mosee, and I don't think I beat him by very much, but I did get enough votes to get back in as a County Commissioner. Now, Dan sued me, and there was a Supreme Court case called Mosee v. Clark that was decided in my favor after the election, and it had to do with me saying that I had been the Sheriff or something; I can't remember what the words were, but Mosee said it implied I was still the Sheriff, and so therefore it was a misrepresentation. But anyway, it all got sorted out, and I was a County Commissioner in Multnomah County. When I was running, Mel Gordon approached me and said that he ...

EB: He was a County Commissioner at the time?

DC: Mel Gordon was a county commissioner. Mel Gordon had been a County Commissioner when I was - in fact, it's interesting, if we had lots of time I'd tell you about how he got elected the first time because of Bill Grenfell. You probably don't even know who Bill Grenfell is, do you?

EB: I know of him, yes.

DC: ... and his shenanigans, and anyway, Mel and Dave Eccles both got elected. Dave Eccles was a pretty good supporter of good public policy regarding planning matters, and Mel, his background was that of a small business guy, and yet he was a interested in some of the issues that were involved with planning, including solid waste. In fact, they used to kid Mel for a while about being "solid waste Mel." Then he got interested in water quality because there was a federal initia-tive and Mel was on a NACO committee about water quality, so he wore buttons that said "clean water." So I knew there was interest there, even though, like I say, his background was small business. So Mel was saying, well, he hoped he could work with me. In 1966 he really had wanted to run for Chairman against Mike, and I kind of positioned him out of that, so in a way he could have been angry and grudgeful but was not. Mel and I always liked each other and got along and communicated well. So he said he wanted to work with me. And I said, "Gee, that's great, Mel." I said, "I'd like to work with you, and Mel, what I'd really like to do when I get to be a County Commissioner is make some real changes in the way land use planning's going in the region. That we change things and not have a land use form driven by the transportation system, but ask for a transportation system to serve the land use we decide is the appropriate land use." Mel said, well, he didn't know about that, but he'd like to work with me. So way before I took office I began to think about how I was going to be effective. The Board of County Commissioners at that time was made up of Mike Gleason, who was old school, an old-time - in fact, Fred Meyer, just before he died, got up and gave a speech and said that he liked the old ways of doing things, like he could call up Mike Gleason, and they'd figure out where they were going to put the next Fred Meyer store. He said, "It's too complicated now, all these citizens and stuff, you know," and indeed that's kind of the way things used to work. So that was Mike, and he was running the County. Then there was Mel, who had the background of a Republican small business guy; Dave Eccles, who did have some good instincts about land use and regional matters and was a liberal Republican. He may have become a Democrat later, I can't remember for sure. And then Larry Aylsworth from Gresham, who was a farmer. He was a decent guy and he had good basic values about taking care of people but he certainly wasn't a progressive, and he wasn't out leading the charge on land use matters. Then there was the position I was running for, and so I needed to get three votes to do anything, and I figured that Mel was the key. So way back before I even got up there I wanted to strategize on how to get good staff to support Mel Gordon, and I worked hard at that. I think Roger Mellam was first. Roger Mellam was a guy who had letters of recommendation from both Wayne Morse and Bob Packwood for Roger Mellam, and of course they didn't like each other at all. Roger Mellam was this young guy who had been an intern for I think the Audubon Society and had been back in Washington D.C. running around doing stuff on the hill and had made all these contacts, and everybody loved him. Even though they didn't necessarily agree with what he was touting, they all loved him. Roger was just terrific, and I supported Mel getting his staff to where Mel had Roger as his personal. About this time there was a movement, an organization called STOP (Sensible Transportation Options for People). Charlie Merten and Betty Merten, who lived in Eastmoreland, were some of the principal agitators for this movement out in Southeast Portland to stop the Mt. Hood Freeway. There had been a lot of thrashing going on; in fact, Mel had been engaged in some of it regarding the I-205 and where they were going to have the I-205. Actually, I think there were going to be several freeways. One of them was going to be a 39th Avenue freeway, and then there was going to be - if you took the whole banana that had been proposed by the Moses plan, it seemed like there was a freeway every mile or so, but it probably wasn't that bad. Anyway, the I-205, Mel had become involved because there had been a constituency of people in Maywood Park who didn't want the freeway to go through Maywood Park, and Mel lived out that way. He was active with some of that early on. Multnomah County, before I had become a Commissioner, had given corridor approval for the Mt. Hood Freeway. They hadn't for the I-205. But anyway, the Mount Hood Freeway was a fait accompli, it was done, and they had signed off and all the papers had gone to Salem and then they'd all gone to Washington D.C., and everything was going to happen. I knew all this. It must have been in 1972, when I was running for reelection, and I had to take a position on that because I was out there on the stump, and people were saying, "Well, what do you think about the Mt. Hood Freeway?" From everything I saw it was bad news. I had seen Gresham go from a very nice little town surrounded by berry fields to just a sprawling blob. I also had a big fight with Glen Otto about that time. He was Mayor of the City of Troutdale. Glen Otto got them to annex Sweetbrier Estates, clear over almost to Gresham. This was south of Stark Street. And Troutdale, at that time was clear over on Sandy Boulevard. They reached clear over and annexed this little tiny place called Sweetbrier, and that meant that every-thing between Sweetbrier and Troutdale essentially was lost because they were going to put sewers and urban services in there, and all that agricultural land and everything would be gone. I hit the roof, and I went after them publicly. They also annexed on the other side of the Sandy River, and they were going to annex right up to Corbett, right up the Gorge they were going to go. So I threw a fit about that. I remember another time that Corbett was trying to incorporate, and the County had some lever against that, and we stopped them. Also, this freeway thing was there, and so I remember I struggled with it because in some ways, even though there were some folks out there who said that they didn't want to see it built, the establishment wanted to see it built. In fact, the establishment doesn't like to see anything that's a done deal challenged. I remember going to a public forum someplace out in Southeast Portland, and I told those people, particularly from STOP, that I had come to the decision that I thought the County had erred in the approval of the Mt. Hood Freeway corridor, and that I planned to bring it back up at the County and see if we couldn't do something about it. Right after that Ron Buel came to see me, and Ron Buel urged me to do all these things, and I told Ron, I said, "Well, what the hell's the matter with the City? Why isn't Neil (Goldschmidt) doing something about that?" "Well, he's not in a position that he can do that right now." So Ron was kind of cheering me on, and I was angry because they weren't doing something about it. Of course, the City is a part of the County. I felt the City ought to be doing something. Lloyd Anderson knew, as did others.

EB:Lloyd Anderson sent Frank Frost out there to try to figure out what the State was doing out there in that corridor.

DC: Well, anyway, I told Mel I was going to bring this up, and Mel said, "Oh, God, do you have to do that? Why do you want to stir up that pot?" "I've got to do that, Mel. We're going to have hearings. I'm going to put it on the agenda, and we're going to have hearings."

EB: Now, were you the Chairman at that time?

DC: No. Mike was the Chairman. And I told Mike we were going to do that, and Mike didn't want to do it, either. There was a nice guy, who had been a friend of my father's, who was the head of the Port, and then he went down to Salem and headed state transportation...

EB: George Baldwin?

DC: George Baldwin. Nice man. He was also a friend of Mike's; they had known each other as kids. Anyway, George Baldwin appeared at this public hearing for the State Department of Transportation, and so did Glenn Jackson. When Glenn Jackson showed up, I knew we had the power. I knew that we really could do it, otherwise, why would Glenn Jackson be there? We had the hearing, and of course it was marvelous. Charlie Merten was there and all kinds of other people, with facts and figures and maps and stuff, and by the time they were through, they had made a case. They had made a case that the freeway was really a bad thing to do. The motion to withdraw County approval of the corridor passed four to one. Only Mike supported keeping the status quo. Even Larry Aylsworth from Gresham was convinced by the evidence that was presented. Ben Padrow was on the Board by that time. He had defeated Dave Eccles and had come on the board. Even though I had felt very bad to see Dave Eckels leave the Board, it turned out that Ben Padrow and I were so close, and we worked so well together, and we believed in the same things and we had the same values. It was just a great thing to have him there. Later on after he left the Board he came back as my executive assistant. But anyway, he was a County Commissioner at the time we passed that thing four to one. That really set the thing going. I think Mel had Roger by then, but we didn't have Dave Hupp yet. When I was going to become Chairman of the Board of County Commissioners, I hired Jerry Frey to put my administra-tion together. I had a kind of shadow government, and they were housed in the old Trailways building. Mike was still the County boss supposedly, but he was sick and he wasn't doing anything, and I had this enormous staff. Jerry Frey, who was a professor at Portland State, was in charge. Jerry was an Urban Studies contact, although he was at the School of Social Work. He hired Dave Hupp, who later on became a shadow to Mel. Then we hired Bebe Rucker in planning. I think Bob Baldwin hired Bebe Rucker. And between Bebe Rucker, Roger Mellam, and Dave Hupp Mel Gordon was well supported.

EB: Now, all of that happened before Charlie actually got the court decision, I think.

DC: Yeah. I think that's right.

EB: You guys were way out ahead of everybody else.

DC: I think that's right.

EB: Then Charlie got the court decision. During that time we were actually working on a position for the City, but nobody was public with it at all, except Ron. Ron Buel was fighting that from day one.

DC: Wasn't he working for Neil at that time?

EB: He was Neil's executive Assistant.

DC: Yes.

EB: But he also was one of the founding members of STOP. Ron Buell, Betty Merten, and Jim Howell according to what I heard were the three who started STOP.

EB: Let's talk about I-205.

DC: It was still out there flopping around, and Mel thought maybe it was a bad thing and we should kill it, but on the other hand he thought that might be too much and that it might get all of us recalled. I remember him talking about that. As it turned out, I think I was the only one that dug in my heels and just said, "No 205." Later on when I was elected Chairman, I was put in the ridiculous position of having to negotiate with the State on what I-205 would look like, and how many interchanges it should have, and whether it should have bicycle paths, and would the bicycle paths be on the bridge, and all of those things. The County insisted on a whole lot of stuff. Noise walls and just a ton of stuff. We insisted that the I-205 bridge be able to support light rail, and probably it doesn't, although there's a question whether it does or doesn't, but they were supposed to build that into it. And they were supposed to put away enough land in the corridor so that you could run light rail down the corridor of the I-205. We negotiated all that stuff with the State, plus we negoti-ated the replacement of Rocky Butte Jail and the replacement of the County shops. I was in a peculiar position because politically I was against them building it, and in fact Glenn Jackson asked Ken Gervais "What kind of a deal is this?" He said, "How do I know I can believe you? You work for Don Clark, you're down here negotiating all this stuff about the freeway, and yet Clark's taken a position that he doesn't want to see it built." And Gervais said, "I know it's hard to understand, but it's real. Don Clark is a realist and he knows it's going to be built. He knows that he's going to be hanging out there and he's going to be all by himself, but he wants to make his position very clear politically, and at the same time he wants to make sure if it is built it's the best goddamn freeway we can possibly build." And so Glenn Jackson said, "Okay," and I've got to give him credit, he did a number of things, including assigning Tom Walsh, who was a new Highway Commission member, to negotiate with Tuck Wilson, representing the County, to put together the down-town jail, the Justice Center. Walsh representing the Highway Commission, i.e., Glenn Jackson, and Tuck representing the County spent, you know, hundreds and hundreds of hours until they finally agreed on the replacement of Rocky Butte Jail and the building of the Justice Center downtown, and the movement of the shops out to about 190th. It was really a neat thing because we were able to do some other things that I wanted to do. We built the shops on an old garbage fill. Tor Lyshang had the vision that it could be done. Tor was an engineer, and he had this vision of this wonderful shop that was built on this garbage fill. I had been reading about solar applications and underground buildings and all that kind of stuff, and I wanted it to be the most energy efficient shop in the world. So we got grants to put an enormous solar apparatus on top of the roof which provided most of the heat for the building. I believe it was the largest solar application west of the Mississippi River. But anyway, that was all a part of putting the I-205 deal together. Then a whole bunch of stuff happened. Charlie Merten took them to court. The City got on board. Bob Straub got elected Governor. Even though I think Tom McCall had sympathies for what we were trying to do, he still backed Glenn Jackson, and so he never really helped with the Mt. Hood Freeway, that I remember, anyway. Maybe he did, but I don't remember. I loved Tom McCall. I also love Bob Straub. They were great people and they had wonderful values, and they were fine, decent public servants. But anyway, Bob Straub got elected, and Neil became Mayor, and Neil spent a lot of time I know going to Washington. He really did a journeyman job lobbying in the Congress. Anyway, the transfer came about. There was going to be a transfer of funds, and CRAG - I probably ought to go back. I engineered getting a change of leadership at CRAG, too. Got Homer Chandler out of there, and got Kay Rich in there. In fact, initially I got Kay Rich in there as Homer's deputy, and then we got the votes on the CRAG board - I was on the CRAG board at that time, and it was elected government officials on the CRAG board at that time: Lloyd represented the City, and Granger was from Clark County, and Schumaker was from Clackamas County. Eldon Hout was from Washington County. I don't remember whether Paula Bentley represented the small cities in Multnomah County; she may have. But anyway, we got the votes, and I finally got Lloyd to agree that Homer had to go. Homer was defending all the old stuff, and he didn't get it. He didn't get that we were trying to change the game and not have transporta-tion drive the system. We wanted to get land use to drive the system. So anyway, Kay Rich was much more responsive. I had known Kay for a hundred years, and later on when I became Chairman of the Board of County Commissioners, Kay came in as my executive assistant. He was my executive assistant until such time as he asked my permission to write a grant using County time to get money for a study of a Metro charter. And I said, "You bet, go do it." He wrote the proposal and got an advisory board and Portland was one of several places that got the money. Then Kay came in and said, "I want to leave and go do that job." I said I understood and supported the decision. And he went, and that led to the writing of the charter, and I still can't believe the people actually voted it in, but they did. They voted it in to get rid of CRAG.

EB: What was that ballot title? Kill CRAG.

DC: CRAG had not been much, but at the very end, when Eldon Hout, Bill Young (Mayor of Beaverton) and the other really good people began to trust each other as a group and have a metropolitan vision; we could actually see a metropolitan area, not just the individual jurisdictions we represented. So things really did begin to change then at CRAG, and in some ways it was probably better than it ever was after it was Metro. Having said that, having an elected metro government was seen as another progressive Oregon move.

EB: Plus CRAG right at the end of '74 adopted this regional development plan. That was the first time they had really done something regional in terms of planning.

DC: CRAG also dropped the ball on a number of occasions. I remember once, and I'm sure that Eldon Hout and Lloyd Anderson would tell you the same story, because I chewed on them and threw a fit and everything else, somebody came to us, and I can't remember whether it was - it could have been a water district or something, or maybe it was the State Highway Commission, and they said to the CRAG board, "We have a petition to bring a major water line across the Willamette River at Wilsonville, to the south of the bridge, and to build a settlement called Charbon-neau, and we don't know whether it fits any land use things or not." So everybody kind of stumbled around and said, "Well, gee, we haven't adopted the plan yet. We haven't adopted the metro-politan configuration plan. We haven't done any of that yet, so how can we say you can't do that?" And I said, "You say it by saying it." I said, "What we do is we pass a resolution here now, and we say, 'Don't do it,' and then the State won't do it, and you will not get that sprawl into the agricultural land." I said, "That's how you do it." And everybody just wrung their hands, including Eldon and Lloyd. In fact, Lloyd was the one that said, "Do you realize what a political firestorm you'd create by doing that?" And I said, "I don't care; we ought to do it." I said, "This is our one shot. They're before us right now, they've asked us, we ought to tell them, and we ought to pass it." The thing was, everybody agreed with that position, but nobody would do it. So we dropped the ball there. We dropped the ball again, in fact I'm still angry at Neil - by this time Neil was representing the City on the CRAG board, and it had to do with the Rock Creek campus of Portland Community College, and for whatever reason Neil decided that he didn't want to get caught up in that one. So he was late to the meeting, and I know he had somebody in the room to tell him when the vote had been taken, because if he had been there, there would be no Rock Creek campus because the City's vote and my vote, and I think there was one other person, would have killed it. But he had made a deal with Portland Community College or whatever, because he just didn't show. He stayed away from the game. That's another ball that got badly dropped by CRAG that should have been there. The LCDC stuff and the stuff that was going on down in Salem, that was interesting because it was a part of the time, and you had these people, McPherson, and Halleck, and then you had a lot of citizen kind of people, and you had some well-placed political people in public office in the local governments that believed something really had to take place, too. So there was an environment, there was an opportunity, and you had a governor who believed that we ought to be very progressive, we ought to be way out front, we ought to be pioneering, we ought to be showing the way and everything else. So as a result of that there was almost an unspoken consensus among kind of the political movers that something big ought to happen, and that everybody would support it if it did, you know, at all these different levels. It was big, it was wonderful, it was sweeping, and it's in some ways being pissed away today because that just happens to those things. But at the time, it was a grand, grand thing, and everybody - it took a lot of political will, it took a lot of political credits to pull it off for all the people that were involved, and I'm certainly not claiming any great leader-ship because I was a peripheral saying, you know, "Let's go, let's go." Probably Tom McCall and Ted Halleck - Ted Halleck has got to have been one of the really key guys in all that.

EB: Can you imagine a more bizarre coupling than Hector McPher-son and Ted Halleck?

DC: No. No, I can't. Ted Halleck had passion, and he was a madman. I loved him. Just a great guy. Ted Halleck interviewed me when I was in high school. I was the student body vice president at Franklin High School, and I was on some kind of a program - Ted Halleck was a radio guy, and he did this little program of these high school leaders. We were sitting there, from the various high schools, and he'd pass the microphone around and we'd all say something. So I've seen him in all kinds of roles in his lifetime. One of the great things you get if you live in a town your whole life, you know, you see all these different episodes that people have.

EB: Do you recall any difficulties that the County might have had in complying with the LCDC rules on the comprehensive plan and everything?

DC: Well, yeah. By that time, when we were supposed to be moving to come up with our plan to go into compliance, the County - I mean, there's a lot I probably could tell you about that. I want to come back to that, but I don't want to leave what I think was this kind of unspoken consensus, this networking, this kind of you can count on somebody else to be there, you don't even have to ask kind of thing. Tom McCall wanted to see a waterfront park and told Glenn Jackson he wanted to do it. Of course that required the City to go along, and it required the City to vacate, you know, major arterials and a whole bunch of stuff like that, and it required Multnomah County to vacate an off-ramp to the Hawthorne Bridge, and if it didn't, I don't know if you could have built it because traffic just keeps going down there. But without McCall making a phone call to the City - as far as I know he never did, and he certainly never called the County - he just knew. He just knew if it was grand enough, and it made sense, and it was good and it was progressive, and it was going to hang together someplace, that there would be people kind of following behind him, and it would happen. And that's exactly what happened on that, and that was a very important thing to having the quality that the city has today was...

EB: Waterfront Park.

DC: Waterfront Park, you bet it was.

EB: And it's an interesting story, too. Lots of interesting stories.

DC: Oh, there are. When I was going to become Chair of the Board of County Commissioners, Denny West and Ken Jurvis and I went up to Mt. Hood, and we drew a game plan, and it had two tracks. One was political, and it was how I got elected, and all the political crap that had to be done, you know, the fundraisers and all this kind of stuff. The other one was programmatic and things that had to move at the County, and I had this shadow government by this time. I had a whole administration in waiting, you know, tucked into the Trailways Building, and they were grinding stuff out and putting stuff together, and we had all kinds of plans and preparations going on. So anyway, we mapped all these things, and it was incredibly detailed, and it looked like it was just overwhelming, like it would take a divine intervention to pull all that stuff off. Then we had what we called - it didn't fit in either one of those tracks, the Turkey Book. And the Turkey Book was a notebook, and I had that until the day I left public office, of things that were just difficult and you didn't know quite how to deal with them, but something had to happen to them. And by the way, it got thinner and thinner and thinner until it was almost nonexistent by the time I left office. But one of the big items was the implementation of Multnomah County's plan under LCDC, to be in compliance, and it was seen as a big deal, and it was going to be politically hot, it was going to be technically complicated. Nobody was quite sure how to do it because nobody had ever done that under LCDC. We were the most urban county, and in many ways had the most conflicts in the countryside, and I had taken the position that I wanted to see Multnomah County first to comply. I don't think we were; I think somebody else may have been, a little tiny county in Eastern Oregon or something like that, but I had taken the political position that Multnomah County would be there and we would comply, and it made sense, and LCDC made sense, and we were going to be there, and all that kind of stuff. So the marching orders were there. I remember Jurvis and I got into it. I appointed Jurvis as Director of Environmental Services at Multnomah County - or first of all he was my exec., one of two. I had Kaye Rich and Ken Jurvis, who didn't like each other, which was interesting. Later on I moved Ken over to be in charge of the Department of Environ-mental Services. Then Ken came up and said that he wanted to hire Martin Crampton, and I said, "Well, I like Bob Baldwin. I want to keep Bob Baldwin." I said, "Bob Baldwin is a prince, he's one of the best guys around. A while back the establishment downtown didn't trust Lloyd Keefe [?], and they came over to the County and borrowed Bob Baldwin. He's got more credibility in this town than anybody I can think of. He's a straight professional." And Jurvis says, "If you want me to do this job, you're going to have to let me hire the people I think I can get the work out of, and I want a mean, nasty, tough son-of-a-bitch to get us through this thing and to fight these battles." And he said, "And I think that Martin Crampton, the guy out in Washington County" - and Martin had a good reputation and he'd been making some waves, and Ed Sullivan was out there, also, making waves, and later on Ed of course became Bob Straub's lawyer. So Ken wanted to hire Martin. So I finally said, "Okay." I said, "But Bob Baldwin stays because there will come a time Martin Crampton will go, and Bob Baldwin's a career county employee." And so Ken said, well, okay, he'd let Martin deal with that. So then he came in and said that he wanted to reduce Bob Baldwin's salary, and I went through the goddamn ceiling. I told him, "Absolutely not." I said, "You're not going to insult that man any further. That is enough." So Bob Baldwin kept his salary. And Bob Baldwin - what a prince - took the position that, "Well, I'm looking forward to working with Martin Crampton. I probably can learn a lot from him." I mean, can you imagine the grace of that guy that did that? Martin was good. Martin came in there, and he did put a process together, and he hired a lot of people, a lot of very good people. I remember Dave Fredricksen was particularly talented and worked with the people out in deep East Multnomah County - I mean, the really difficult people to work with. In fact, in some of those places he had to kind of go mobilize them because they were so diffuse, they hated each other so bad that it was hard to get a group of them together to be kind of a planning advisory group and so on, so we had to do some neighbor-hood organizing and stuff. But they ground it out one neighbor-hood at a time and brought those before the Board of County Commissioners. Martin was good. The staff work was good, and the presenta-tions were good, and it was based on solid information, and the Board I thought had a fairly easy time making the decisions. And it's almost predictable who voted what way. Mel sometimes struggled because his instinct of a small business guy would pop back in. If some guy says, "Well, I just want to expand my business a little bit into this nice residential neighborhood," or something, Mel would get a little nervous because he could visualize being in that guy's shoes. But Mel gave me his word he was going to be a team player, and almost one hundred percent of the time I could absolutely count on Mel's vote for just about anything. In fact, sometimes it was almost funny because he'd start off clear over there someplace in a completely opposite direction, and I'd just wait, and he'd talk himself through these things, and he'd eventually come around and he'd vote right. I knew he would. Dennis would wring his hands and worry and stew, and be lobbied by people and all this kind of stuff, and I think some of it was very hard for Dennis. But generally speaking, the whole thing wasn't as hard as it probably should have been, and I think the plan was good. There were some things - I thought the stuff we did about the Gorge, protecting the Gorge, and some of that was some of the early momentum that led to the movement later on about my own interest in and my own push to try to get a national scenic area, and then the protection of Sauvie Island. We had a couple of studies on Sauvie Island. One Bob Baldwin did, and I think it was Skidmore Owens & Merrill, I think we hired them to do a study down there, and they did a big planning study. And then later on under LCDC we did it again, and there was, over the years, and there probably still is, a lot of behind the scenes maneuvering trying to urbanize Sauvie Island. We've always been able to cut that off, although it's amazing, right after Earl Blumenauer came on the board, one of the first decisions made was on some land use decision and exception down on Sauvie Island, and he wanted to give everything away. And I used the term "creeping incrementalism," and Earl threw a fit and demanded that the planning staff define "creeping incrementalism." So it was my term, but Crampton, or whoever it was - probably it was Baldwin again by that time - had to go out and come back with a definition of "creeping incrementalism" for Earl Blumenauer. I remember one time my own instincts got in the way. Martin Crampton wanted to see me privately, so he came in to see me, and he said, "I'm troubled by the speeches you're making about preserving area in East Multnomah County east of the airport as farmland." I said, "Well, I think it should be." I said, "I think it should be farmland. It's always been farmland. It's close to town, it's where truck gardens are, it's close to market, and I think it makes sense. It's in the floodplain." What I thought, see? And Martin said, "Well, I'm going to have to go and remake and turn over the entire process so far because everything we've got says that that's industry. Everything we've got says that that is where the industry ought to locate and that ought to be the growth area for industrial development in the metropolitan area, and there are nematodes in the ground out there," and he went through all these soil things that - you know, I don't know anything about nematodes or soils or anything. So he finally convinced me that I needed to get off of that. And he also said that what I would do, unless I put jobs there or someplace, there's this mass of people who live on the Southeast out to Gresham, and unless those people have jobs, you're going to have one great welfare street out there, and you need to provide jobs that are fairly close to that population that now is under-employed and unemployed and all that kind of stuff. So probably he was right, and probably I was wrong by my instincts. But I also just hated to give that up because I was a deputy sheriff out there, and I drove around through those dairy farms and those truck gardens and all those Italian gardeners out there, and I thought that was gorgeous and that's the way it ought to be. But it's not.

EB: Well, I hope Martin has had the opportunity to go and check out his assumption, how many people that live out in East County are working over there in the Columbia area.

DC: Martin, of course, left and went to North Carolina. He went back and became the planning director - I don't think for the State, although it could have been. I think it was for a major city, and I don't remember which one, in North Carolina.

EB: There's a region of three cities. There's of course Raleigh...

DC: Yeah, Raleigh. That's what it was. They came out here just to see Portland and see CRAG and see all these kind of things, and then they went back there, and later on they made a job offer to Martin. I think that's the way it went. And he left and went back there. Hugh Tilson, who was the health officer at Multnomah County, also went to North Carolina as the health officer. He didn't last very long. The medical association got him. He began implementing nurse practitioners all over the place as the health provider of choice for poor people in rural North Caroli-na, which is absolutely right, and of course the medical society just went ballistic. But poor old Hugh Tilson bounced out of there and became the money giver-awayer at Bur-roughs Welcome [?]. He became the guy at Burroughs Welcome who managed all of their grants and all of their research and all that kind of stuff, so he had one of the most prestigious public health jobs in the world. So that's what happened to him. Let's see, what else should we talk about in planning? Is that enough? Have I worn out all the planning stuff?

EB: Well, I don't know. Maybe we'll think of some more. A couple of other things. Talk a little bit about some of the people that were walking with you along the line there. You've already mentioned many of them. Are you leaving any out there that might be important to mention?

DC: Well, there's a lot of people. Bruce Harder. Bruce Harder was getting his Ph.D. at the Urban Studies Center. There's another urban studies connection. I was becoming Chair of the Board of County Commissioners, and Denny said he knew this really great guy, a graduate student, and we ought to figure out how to bring him on board.

EB: This is Denny West?

DC: Denny West. At that time, for whatever reason, Mel didn't have staff, and we didn't ever want to have Mel unstaffed. We wanted to have Mel staffed up to the eyebrows. So I said, "Gee, could we put him on temporarily as Mel's executive assistant to help shepherd Mel along?" And Denny said that he thought Bruce would find that an interesting challenge. In fact, I think Bruce learned a lot, and then Bruce later on left that job and became the budget manager at Multnomah County, and then he became the Director of the Office of County Management. He's been at Tri-Met for I don't know how many years now, 20 years or something, as the comptroller at Tri-Met, and the reason he's over there is that Jim Cowen, who is Executive Director of Tri-Met, told me that the only public budget he's ever seen that he could understand was Multnomah County's. He said he never could understand Tri-Met's budget, but he said that he could open up Multnomah County's budget and he understood it correctly, and that's why he hired Bruce Harder, and Bruce Harder went over there. Bruce Harder was one of, you know, a whole cadre of really bright people, all supporters of good land use planning, too, and they were all over the County. They weren't just in planning, they weren't just in the Department of Environmental Services, they were throughout the government. It is a management core that believes in planning and is very supportive of planning, wants to have the resources there to get the job done and all that kind of stuff. Wants to help bear the burden of public backlashes and stuff like that when it comes. So it was a very supportive environment for planning to go on in Multnomah County. There was a guy who initially was a part of the shadow government: Jerry Frye was the guy that I hired to put together the kind of shadow government, a Portland State guy, an associate at Urban Studies, even though he was in social work, actually, but he also did part-time in urban studies. So he was just another draw from urban studies in many ways, but Jerry hired a lot of people, including Dave Hupp. Then he hired another guy by the name of Sonny Condor.

EB: Oh, I remember Sonny. He's still over there at Metro.

DC: Is he? I didn't know what ever happened to Sonny. But Sonny, and all these people, these really bright people, some of them with a lot of academic training, there were several Ph.D.'s, a number of dissertation shy of Ph.D. people, in that environ-ment, and they were thinkers and analyzers of things. I remember they just kept looking at all the issues at the County, including not just land use issues, but all the issues, financial issues, and then they got into financing of the government, and where the money comes from and where it goes, and all that kind of stuff, and if you can calculate with any kind of certainty if you're going to get some next year or if it's going to be just catch as catch can, and if you can predict, then you can plan better how to budget your money and all that kind of business. Well, out of all that grinding away there was a series of financial planning reports. Now, in a way you can say that's not planning; it's certainly not land use planning, it's financial planning, and we did a lot of that. It was important to the government, and we did studies on capital maintenance programs that went for 50 years and knew how much money we had to put away and everything. Now, as far as I know that did not survive me leaving Multnomah County. All that died when I left Multnomah County. But there was a period when I was there - I told some-body the other night that one of the great things about having been County Chairman and County Executive, if I had some kind of a problem in my head that I saw something out there, I could turn and ask staff, "What are my options here?" and they'd come back and they'd give me 15 different ways to look at that, and differ-ent approaches and different moves you could make and stuff like that. It was just absolutely marvelous. It's the way it ought to be. I had these good people, and Sonny Condor was one of those, and he came up with things called Condor-grams, I mean that's what the other staff referred to them as, because they were funny little graphs and stuff like that, where he'd show you things that you could not miss what the message was. I had been out in Gresham, and I - those people in Gresham were angry with Multnomah County because they weren't getting their fair share, and we were paying too much attention to Portland, and I had made too big a deal about the County not being against the City, that the City of Portland was a part of Multnomah County, and therefore the County ought to be very supportive of the City. And I'd made that, you know, a part of my platform, and it alienated a lot of people in East Multnomah County. So I was out giving a speech in Gresham, and I had somebody stand up and say, "We're not getting our fair share. Down west of 82nd, that's where you're spending all your money, and they're the people that are getting the County's money, and we're not getting our fair share." And I said, "Well, I'll tell you what. I will produce for you an analysis of that, and I will give you the facts, whatever they are." I said, "You may be right, you may be wrong, but we'll find out." So I went back, and the County did an initial analysis, and it looked like there was a big transference of money for services east of 82nd coming from west of 82nd. But in order to make sure that the thing was untainted, we contracted with the Urban Studies Center at Portland State. We gave them, I don't know, $15,000 or something and they turned a bunch of graduate students loose on that, and they produced a document that showed that there was a transference of money from urban areas to suburban areas and to rural areas, and that the people of the City of Portland subsidized to some degree the people in Gresham, but to the greatest degree the people who lived in unincorporated Multnomah County. I don't remember which financial planning report that was, but we had a series of these, and we also had a financial planning report that differentiated one-time-only money from continuing money, continuing revenue - and that was CICR, continuing internally generated county revenue, and then CICE was internal controlled county expenditures, or something like that, and you didn't want CICR and CICE to be too far apart because you were in trouble if they were. You spent one-time-only money for one-time-only expenditures. The interesting thing is this has become, as Bruce Harder and his budget staff, and as the planning staff, the financial planners, articulated these things and put them into these reports, they now have become principles not only in county government, but at the City of Portland, at Tri-Met, and at most of the local governments in the general area, and a lot of that is attributable back to Bruce Harder and Sonny Condor, who dreamed up a lot of that stuff and then analyzed it and put it out there in written form so people could track it. Felicia Trader [?], who ran PDC, the last job she did before she retired, ran the budget office for some time. Helen Barney is one of my absolutely favorite managers of all time. I think she is one of the most talented public managers I've ever seen. She started out as the assistant to the public information person in my office, and immediately she began making her influ-ence felt everywhere. Then she went from there to the information officer, and then she went from that to the management coordinator, and then she went from that to the budget officer. I made her the strike manager when Multnomah County had a strike, and I could tell you funny stories about that, but that's not a part of our planning.

EB: She is of a type, you know, women, well-educated, housewives for a good deal of their younger life, came into Portland things in the '70s, early '80s, and made a whale of a difference. Just made a big difference.

DC: They sure did. Among others that worked for me was Lynn Bonner, who worked on my staff.

EB: Oh, that's right. I remember.

DC: Lee Brown went on to be the Mayor of the city of Houston. I remember Lee coming to resign as - first of all, I'd hired him as Sheriff, and then I promoted him to the Director of Justice Services to plan the new downtown jail and stuff, and he ran the Sheriff's Office and corrections and the court's budget and all the allied justice-related stuff in Multnomah County. A big chunk of Multnomah County government is justice. So Lee Brown came in, and he had already been going down to Atlanta a lot, and he kept being invited back to give speeches and stuff like that, and so I knew that Lee had contacts all over the country, and I knew that Lee Brown had in his mind kind of a dream that someday he would like to be Chief of Police in a city that had a substantial minority population, particularly a minority black population. So Lee came in, and he said, "They have offered me the job of Director of Public Safety for the city of Atlanta." I said, "Well, I'm not surprised at all." I said, "Lee, I don't want you to leave, I want you to stay, but on the other hand, if you've decided you're going to go, I know you'll do a great job, and I'm going to give you my best regards." And he left and went to Atlanta, and he was down there when they had all those little kids that were killed by that crazy guy, and Lee was really under the gun. He had the national spotlight on him, and everybody wanted him to make sweeps and arrest everybody under the sun, and he said, "They have not suspended the Constitution in this case."